Comic budget issues again

There's an interesting article up at Newsarama--What Cost Summer? Secret Invasion/Final Crisis Running Tallies--which is pretty interesting reading for those of us who aren't in the Bruce Wayne/Tony Stark income bracket. If you don't feel like clicking for the details, it turns out that if you buy every single book and tie-in you'll spend $316.98 for Secret Invasion and $115.14 for Final Crisis.

So I suppose that Final Crisis is the event of choice for the budget-conscious comic fan.

Now, my typical approach to events is to just buy what I usually buy, and possibly the main event series if it interests me (in this case, the actual Secret Invasion and Final Crisis titles); at this point I only buy tie-ins if they're of particular interest (generally they are not) or if they feature a favorite character or team. It usually works out that I don't spend much more than I would have spent on comics anyway. (Didn't care a bit about World War Hulk, didn't spend an extra penny on WWH books, and luckily it didn't push too far into my usual comic reading.)

That means that all I'm getting for Final Crisis is, in fact, Final Crisis.

I am, however, getting more of the Secret Invasion books, but that's mainly because I already get things like Mighty Avengers, New Avengers, Ms. Marvel and so forth. So no extra expense there. I'm also getting the main Secret Invasion title (although the fact that they're all 3.99 for no discernible reason is a little annoying--then again Final Crisis is as well). The only tie-in we're picking up (and there are a bunch of them) is the Secret Invasion: Young Avengers/Runaways mini, and that's solely because of the characters featured. That still adds a total of $68.82 to this year's comic purchases, and almost all of that is due to just the $3.99-each main titles. It's spread out over time so it's not as bad as all that in terms of monthly purchases, but still it's something to think about.